If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This (18 page)

“Three years, Claire. It’s more than three years. When are you planning to come back from the dead?” He takes a step toward me and reaches for my shoulders—like a parent about to shake a child. His fingers press into me, hard. His teeth are clenched so hard his chin is trembling. Then suddenly he lets me go. “You know what?” He shakes his head. “I think it’s time for me to find people who want to be happy. A woman who wants to be happy. I need…”

I look up into those soft, gentle eyes of his.
Anything, anything, anything at all
. It’s all still there, I’m sure. It has to be. That love I was so afraid was inside him, when he was inside of me. I only have to give the smallest sign. Just tell him I can try.

“Oh fuck,” I say, and watch his face fall, slack.

“That’s all I needed, Claire.” He shoves his hands back into his coat pockets. “I’m gonna head home now.” He glances back toward the field. “Tell Alyssa I said, Good game.”

“Kevin, this isn’t like you. Please don’t be angry.”

“Angry? Why not, Claire?” He isn’t looking at me as he speaks. “Think about it. Really. Think about it. Think about everything you and I have been through.” He squints a little and then faces me again. “You don’t owe Joe being miserable. And neither do I.”

A hand comes out from his coat pocket; and I think he’s going to reach for me. I think he’s going to touch my cheek. But he just shakes his head one more time instead. I see his car keys glistening in his fist. And I watch then as my yes-man walks away. First one step and then another. I watch and I wait, as though at any moment he might come to me again, retracting his withdrawal. But first his light brown jacket fades from view. Then a minute or so later I hear the distant sound of a starting car. And I realize that I’ve been fired.

“J
ust be grateful it isn’t Alyssa,” Joe would say, forcing me to nod, to look into his deep brown eyes and agree to see some future hope. “We’re so lucky it isn’t either of you. Just be grateful that it isn’t one of you. I can handle dying; I couldn’t handle it if it were you or her.”

But I can’t handle this
, I’d thought, helpless as the man I loved dissolved before my eyes.
I can’t handle you leaving me
.

Kevin had resisted at first. “It’s not even a year. I don’t think you’re ready to start something new.”

“Nothing in the world can hurt our friendship,” I said. “And this is only sex.”

I find a clump of trees, a little apart from the playing field, away from Alyssa and away from Heidi, away from the other parents that I know. Away from having to talk to anyone or look anyone in the eyes. A few times I see Alyssa glance my way, questioning, as though she knows that something’s wrong, but the whistle blows and the game resumes with its hustle and bustle, my daughter streaking up and down the field.

There are cheers and exclamations in the air, but a quiet hovers where I stand. It seems to have its roots deep inside of me, as though I am immersed again in the same unnatural silence I remember from the six weeks between Joe’s diagnosis and his death. The minutes pass through me and the branches above lose their colors in the swarming dusk, darkening into black silhouettes against the sky. Under them, I struggle to stay here, in the present, as Kevin said. To resist those terrible, tempting days that have somehow become my refuge now. Only weeks for Joe to live and not a goddamned thing to do except stay by his bedside and watch him disappear. And disappear myself.

Across the way, Heidi is alone again, but Roger is close by, standing near the snack boxes, talking to another of the fathers. Before she ever introduced me to him, I saw them together coming across this same stretch of field, and I knew then that he had to be her husband. Just from watching how they moved, how they walked at the identical halting and gradual pace—as though that pause between her steps had become his pause too, as though the absent leg was gone equally, eternally from them both. A perfect, imperfect, made-for-each-other gait.

Kevin would do that for me, I know. Kevin would walk with a hitch in his own step, with a step-clump-step to match my own.

The end whistle blows—too soon, I think—startling me, and I see all the girls on Alyssa’s team run together, hear them holler a whooping yell. The two teams line up to shake each other’s hands. Muttering,
Good game, good game, good game
, their voices are flat and indistinguishable, but the undeniable facts of victory and loss are spread across each face.

“Congratulations,” I say when Alyssa comes running to me. “Good job.”

“Thanks, Mom. It was a good game.” She frowns. “Where’d Kevin go? Did he get bored?”

“No, not bored at all. Just busy. Hurry up and get your stuff. I’ll buy you a burger.”

I reach to brush a wisp of hair off her damp forehead. Her lips are slack, open from breathing hard, and her cheeks are flushed red—except where the mascara she painted around her father’s eyes stains her skin in gray, sweaty circles. There’s a question lingering on her face, an unanswered question still about the man who walked away. She is only wondering how to ask me, I know, wondering if she has the right, wondering if I will tell her the truth. I touch one of the streaky patches on her cheek.

“I was right, wasn’t I?” she asks. “About Kevin? How he feels?”

“Yes,” I say, looking into her eyes, so like the ones I lost. “You were right.”

“What happened, Mom?”

It’s a good question. I look away from her. From him.

Around us, the families are all saying goodbye. The playing field itself is empty, silent, still. Soon there will be only hints that we were here at all; a couple of forgotten water bottles lying on the ground, somebody’s jacket crumpled beneath a tree. No traces of the cheers or the names called out loud. No lingering tension over who will win or lose.

“What happened, Mom?” she asks again.

“Come on,” I say, my hand on her back. “It’s time to go home.”

As we walk together, neither of us speaks. I cannot find the right words. She is asking for answers and I am as filled with questions as she could ever be, as filled with a sense of standing on an edge as my daughter whose childhood is loosing its hold, whose life is daily widening its embrace. At the curb, before we cross to the car, I turn around, toward the field, half expecting to see Heidi sitting there, as though she alone might still be waiting for me. But she has gone, and so has her canvas throne. Only my old yellow beach chair remains beside that empty space, out of season and left behind, improbably vivid, improbably bright, against the autumn hues, against the failing day.

A
Country
Where
You
Once
Lived

I
T ISN’T EVEN
a two-hour train ride out from London to the village where Jeremy’s daughter and her husband—a man Jeremy has never met—have lived for the past three years, but it’s one of those trips that seems to carry you much farther than the time might imply. By around the halfway point the scenery has shaken off all evidence of the city, all evidence, really, of the past century or two. Or so it seems to Jeremy as long as he blurs his eyes to the occasional black line of motorway snaking through it all, to the dots of color speeding along the line. Otherwise, it’s pretty much all mild shades of green and milling cows, sheep clustered at copses, church steeples appearing at regular intervals in a gentle, reassuring rhythm. It’s a fantasy landscape, he thinks. The kind that encourages belief in the myth of uncomplicated lives.

Jeremy is riding backward so is watching it all recede, and the sensation is oddly saddening. Or maybe not so oddly saddening. A scientist, a cancer researcher, he passes his days in the flux and flow between the minute facts of molecular composition and our comparatively clunky selves. He knows well that for all the brain’s cellular elegance, it has too this kind of simple, simplistic aspect to it. Leaving is sad. Even just the illusion of leaving is sad. As each view recedes, his eyes are tricked and in turn trick his brain: he is
leaving… leaving… leaving…
Of course he feels sad.

That’s what he tells himself anyway as he rides along, that his settling melancholy is at least in part the mechanical product of a cause-and-effect process of sensory input and reflexive response.

Maybe it will wear off as the day goes on, he tells himself.

T
he reason Jeremy Piper has never met his son-in-law is that he hasn’t seen his daughter, Zoe, in just over four years. The reason he hasn’t seen his daughter in all that time is a bit harder to determine, some lethal blend of ancient angers and the seductive ease of separation three thousand miles granted them thirteen years earlier. In the early days, back in Boston by himself, Jeremy was capable of working himself into a strangely personal anger at the Atlantic Ocean, as though it were some kind of bully standing between him and his family, as though he were overmatched. But increasingly he’s aware of how much blame belongs to him.

The fulcrum of his life, the fateful before-and-after line, was the year they all spent in London, starting June 1996. “Our very own annus horribilis,” his wife called it at the time.

They went to England, he, Cathleen, and Zoe, so he could begin the work for which he has since garnered much acclaim, a study of the potential cancer-fighting properties of an enzyme found in a particularly deadly mushroom growing only in Britain—or, as Cathleen began saying some months in:
on the potential cancer-fighting properties of an enzyme found in blah, blah, blah
. Neither Cathleen nor Zoe, sixteen at the time, wanted to make the move, until Jeremy won Cathleen over with the argument that taking Zoe away from her thoroughly dislikable, probably criminal friends could only be a good idea. But then just about one month into the stay, Zoe ran away from home with a Boston boy, a school friend backpacking the Lake District over his summer break. And she didn’t just run away; she left no word about where she had gone, no sign that she had gone under her own steam.

Jeremy could only ever remember bits and moments from those two weeks, the ones when she was gone. Merciful amnesia, a friend once called it—except it wasn’t very merciful, because only the worst of it stuck with him. Or so he assumed. Like the first shock at her absence, as too many hours passed for it to be benign teenage tardiness; like walking the streets of London, night after night, as though she might have become a nocturnal creature waiting to reveal herself in the dark; like the dawning nightmarish realization that he himself was a suspect in her disappearance. “We’re not making any accusations. You wouldn’t want us to leave any stone unturned.” He imagined himself on trial, wrongly convicted, locked away, the headlines, clever if obvious plays on his name:
Tried Piper Lured Own Daughter…
That was a uniquely vivid memory. But still, there were long stretches from those days during which, for all he could ever remember, he might as well have been dead.

That wasn’t true of what followed her return. The difficulty was never remembering that period but letting it go. Particularly his own trouble accepting that she hadn’t been abducted, she had left of her own free will. And that she hadn’t been unable to contact them, she had chosen not to. His own disbelief at the disappearance of the villain he had conjured and blamed for it all, the man who had been the target of his rage while she was gone, the object of revenge fantasies so violent and so vile Jeremy had barely admitted them to himself. The man who had doubtless killed his daughter, doubtless done God knew what else to her and in the process—minor collateral damage, Jeremy understood—destroyed her father.

Except there was no man. There was only his Zoe, sixteen years old and sorry, really, really sorry, for what she had done.

Or so she said.

At home, he would watch her. He would study his daughter the way he studied the animals in his lab, as though doing so might provide some kind of solution. She had returned rail thin, all eyes and bone. Her honey hair was jet black. Her lips were perpetually chapped, as though she’d been drained of some essential human moisture. She looked like a wraith, otherworldly, but she did normal things. That was what kept him mesmerized. The way she sat at the kitchen table eating yogurt. The fact that she spoke on the phone. That she listened to music. That she walked through the doorways of their elegant rented town house without falling to her knees at every threshold to reflect on what she had done.

For reasons he never understood, Cathleen had escaped official suspicion. And she had also resisted the idea that there was a villain to the piece—so she hadn’t learned to hate as elaborately as he. That was his theory anyway, the foundation on which he built his resentment: that it had all been much easier on her. So he envied her, and he was angry at her, and about six weeks after Zoe’s return, Jeremy embarked on a standard-issue, utterly predictable affair with a colleague at the lab, despite the fact that he didn’t like the woman very much. Liking her or not liking her seemed oddly irrelevant to the decision to have sex with her a few times a week. The truth was, he wasn’t a bit sure he would ever like anyone again. He seemed to have lost the thread of how affections worked.

Ultimately, the smug satisfaction of doing something behind Cathleen’s back lost out to the impulse to hurt her, so one night toward the end of the year, motivated more by spite than by anything like remorse, he confessed. She looked momentarily confused—shock at his disclosure, he assumed—then confessed her own affair right back at him. Under different circumstances, that might have signaled a chance to start over, one betrayal canceling out the other, the slate wiped clean; but as it went, they were like the dueling pair that shoots simultaneously, so both end up dead.

There were never any fights after that, not even much open acrimony, just an overwhelming atmosphere of defeat in the house. With all the predictable unkindness of irony, as the family broke apart it turned out that Cathleen and Zoe had both grown to feel at home in England and they decided to stay on. It was while driving Jeremy to Heathrow for his miserable, solo flight back to the States that Cathleen borrowed the queen’s phrase.

“Our very own annus horribilis,” she said. “I feel positively royal.”

I
t’s Cathleen, unmistakably Cathleen, waving from the platform of the Thomas the Tank Engine station when Jeremy’s train comes to its stop.

“Hello, you!” she calls out as he steps down.

He wasn’t expecting her there. He waves—a small waist-level gesture, one arm pulling a bag, the other weighted with his computer. “Hello, you,” he echoes, too quietly to be heard.

He’s a bit numb as he walks toward her. It’s been fully five years. He used to see her quite often at family events when she would jet over, sometimes with Zoe, sometimes alone, moving across the ocean with an ease he never thought about too clearly when cursing the Atlantic’s role in his life. Over time, they progressed from avoiding each other at those events to seeking each other out as people with whom they could at least be themselves. They even once drunkenly stumbled into a sexual encounter that they tacitly agreed neither to repeat nor ever mention again; and the next few times they saw each other after that, he noticed they’d adopted an oddly jocular, teasing style of conversation that reminded Jeremy of the way his brother Jonathan and his old high school football teammates spoke to one another in middle age. But that was all years ago, as ancient in its way as their wedded days.

“I wasn’t expecting you,” he says as they embrace. “I didn’t know you’d be here.”

“Well.” She says it with a slight shrug, as though to convey that it should be obvious why Zoe thought her presence necessary. “I hope it’s at least an okay surprise. Can I help you carry anything?”

“It is. No, I’m fine.”

He’s startled by how entirely
known
she is to him. Not just familiar or even evocative but inevitable in some way, as though she were the mama duck and he the little one on whom she long ago imprinted her heart-shaped face and her dark blue eyes, the straight lines of her posture, the angle at which she held her head, a certain sighing sound she would make before she spoke.

As they walk toward a small lot filled with cars, he feels her settle over him like a climate in which he used to live.

D
riving through the village in Zoe’s ancient black cockroach of a sub-subcompact, Cathleen points out what she calls the big sights: a tea shop, a pub, a bank, an unlikely-looking hotel covered with a profusion of ivy that Jeremy remarks appears more spooky than quaint.

“There’s always a fine line between the two,” she says. “Isn’t there?”

Conversation for conversation’s sake. It doesn’t have to make much sense.

Once they’ve left the village and are onto country roads, she asks him if he’s seeing anyone. He isn’t surprised by the question. It’s always been a point of honor with Cathleen to show no discomfort discussing such things. So he says that yes, he supposes he is, that yes, he is seeing someone, you could call it that; but he doesn’t volunteer much more. Not that her name is Rose—a syllable he loves for sounding more like an endearment than a real name. And not that she is thirty-four years old. Nor that he met her when she rented the third floor of the house he and Cathleen moved into the year after Rose was born. And not that he is in love with her, marrying her in four months. He isn’t planning to tell Zoe any of these things during this visit, and Cathleen has always been a bad liar.

“She works in the university library,” he says.

“Interesting.” But her tone doesn’t quite match the word, as though having proved that the idea doesn’t disturb her, she’s lost interest. Or maybe it does disturb her, and a brief display of equanimity is the best she can do. Either way, after a pause, she volunteers that she’s recently ended a longish relationship with a Russian pianist; and Jeremy recognizes one of her words:
longish
. Along with
shortish, noonish, Fridayish
. A deep vein of imprecision has always run through Cathleen.

“I spent the whole last few months with Uri trying to decide if he was more of a
boooor
or a bore. Until I realized it wouldn’t much matter if he were out of my life.”

They drive in silence for a bit after that.

“What about Colin?” he eventually asks. “What’s he like? Will I like him?”

“Well, if you don’t, you’ll be the first. But you will. He’s one of those people who doesn’t ask the world to worship him, so of course everyone does. And he’s very good to her.”

Jeremy would have given low odds on any husband of Zoe’s lacking a little wash of saintliness. “She seems much happier. In emails, I mean. As far as I can tell, anyway.”

“As happy as any of us,” she says.

“As happy as any of us,” he echoes a moment after that, struck, as he says it, by how happy he’s been of late. Happier than most. Happier than Cathleen, it seems.

“She’s very changed, Jeremy. You’ll see.” There aren’t any intersections in sight when she flicks her turn signal, only property entrances, so he realizes they must be very close. “She’s grown up a lot, you know.”

But of course he doesn’t know. “I’m glad,” he says. “By nearly thirty, that’s the idea. We were parents by her age.”

“That hardly means we’d grown up.” Cathleen turns at a gap between high, thick hedges, onto a long dirt drive. Its ruts and ridges bear witness to a persistent cycle of rain and heat. On either side, anywhere Jeremy looks, vast fields stretch, acres and acres of fields blanketing gentle hills. There are at least three barns in sight and a large half-timbered house right ahead. It is as though they’ve gone through one of those magical gates in children’s stories, into a universe that couldn’t possibly fit into the space concealing it.

“It’s huge,” he says. “It’s enormous. I hadn’t expected anything on this scale.”

“Oh, that’s right.” She beeps the horn with three sharp hits of her fist. “I keep forgetting. You haven’t been here before.”

And Jeremy doesn’t say anything to that. No response comes to mind.

I
t wasn’t Rose’s idea that he write Zoe and ask about a visit, but it was on her account that he did. Jeremy had long been ashamed of this aspect of his life, this glaring lapse of his, this daughter across the water, but he had never before cared so much about having done something shameful.

It was excruciating telling Rose. They were walking. They liked to take walks together in the neighborhood, commenting on the houses he had lived among for three decades but of course never quite seen before. They were just a few blocks from the house when she asked a question that had clearly been on her mind for some time. How often did he see his daughter?